Clements served two years as the editor of Titan Publishing's Manga Max magazine, an experience which he later fictionalized as the Judge Dredd audio adventure Trapped on Titan (2002). His sf work is wholly in the field of Ties to the Doctor Who, Space: 1889, and Highlander (see Highlander II: The Quickening [1990]) universes [for details see Checklist]. His fiction is characterized by experiments in Linguistics, such as "The Nobility of Faith" (in Doctor Who: The Ghosts of Christmas, anth 2007), which retells Aladdin in the style of the Arabian Nights with the Doctor as the djinni; or his audio drama Survival of the Fittest (2010), which examines the translation of an insect language based on scent markers. His work is often derivative of early Larry Niven, including genetically evolved good fortune in "Lucky for Some" (August 2005 Judge Dredd Megazine) (see Psi Powers), and the problem of Teleportation between moving bodies, addressed in Fire From Heaven (2003).

Nonfiction includes two reference works on Japan containing much of sf interest, The Anime Encyclopedia (2001; exp 2006) with Helen McCarthy and The Dorama Encyclopedia (2003) with Motoko Tamamuro, and, most ambitiously, Anime: A History (2013), which examines Japanese animation (see Cinema) from about 1912. Clements is also the author of many books on Asian history, including The First Emperor of China (2005), which begins with a pastiche of Roger Zelazny, to whom it is dedicated. A Brief History of the Samurai (2010) controversially asserts that ninja are wholly fictional creations, invented by twentieth-century Pulp authors. He has written entries on sf in China and Japan for this encyclopedia. [JonC]

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We passed a couple of major milestones on 1st August: the SFE is now over 4.5 million words, of which John Clute’s own contribution has now exceeded 2 million. (For comparison, the 1993 second edition was 1.3 million words, and … Continue reading →

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We’ve been talking for a while about new features to add to the SFE, and another one has gone live today: the Gallery, which collects together covers for sf books and links them back to SFE entries. To quote from … Continue reading →